Baiba Skride first encountered Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto in her early teens while growing up in Latvia during the 1980s. In an environment where pop and rock music were scarce, she found solace in Shostakovich’s music to express her emotions. Over time, the concerto became her go-to piece, as it encompassed a wide range of human feelings, allowing her to channel the pain, anger, and love she experienced as a teenager.
Skride’s desire to play the concerto was initially met with resistance from her teacher, who deemed the work too large and complex for her at the time. Despite this, she secretly practiced the concerto during her first visit to the Aspen Music Festival, carrying the sheet music and listening to recordings on her Walkman. It wasn’t until she moved to Germany to study with Petru Munteanu that she had the opportunity to fully explore the piece, although even Munteanu was hesitant at first. Her public debut of the concerto came in 1998 at the Premio Paganini competition when she was just 17.
Understanding Shostakovich’s concerto requires considerable time and effort. Skride and Munteanu dedicated many hours to studying the work, and her childhood experiences in Communist Latvia — marked by feelings of oppression and the desire to escape — helped deepen her connection to the music. She describes performing the concerto as an intense emotional journey that can be exhausting, so she reserves it for special moments and prefers to play it with trusted collaborators.
Her approach to new music is methodical: she first learns exactly what is written in the score before gradually making the piece her own. Skride contrasts Shostakovich’s concerto with Bartók’s, noting that Shostakovich’s music allows greater freedom of interpretation. While the score provides some markings, the music itself evolves naturally, giving performers room to shape tempos and phrasing, often resulting in spontaneous rubato.
Skride has recorded the concerto twice — once in 2004 early in her recording career, and more recently with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Andris Nelsons in a live recording from 2022. This latter recording took place just after the outbreak of the Russia–Ukraine War, a moment that profoundly affected the musicians. Upon revisiting the recording three years later, Skride was struck by the slower tempo of the second movement and the overall intensity, which she believes reflects the raw emotions felt at the time. She sees this adaptability in interpretation as a testament to the music’s greatness.
When advising students about the concerto, Skride warns against underestimating its difficulty. Beyond the technical challenges, the concerto demands stamina and emotional depth to sustain the intensity, especially in its opening sections. Although frequently performed in competitions due to its dramatic impact, the concerto requires the soloist to truly understand and convey the complex emotions of love, pain, and anger embedded in the music.
